


This is a love story.

by Aethelar



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: A lot of Newt's creatures, Background Relationship, Birth to Death, ties in to harry potter era canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23842438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aethelar/pseuds/Aethelar
Summary: This is a love story. Not the usual sort; it doesn’t end when they marry, and it doesn’t end when they divorce, and the they of it isn’t really important. What’s important is the he.His name is Newt Scamander. He’s born small, loud, with wisps of curly hair that will darken to red-blond when he’s older. He has an older brother who loves him, a mother who loves the idea of him, and a father who dotes on him when he remembers. It’s not a bad start.
Relationships: Newt Scamander & Newt Scamander's Magical Beasts
Comments: 9
Kudos: 74





	This is a love story.

This is a love story. Not the usual sort; it doesn’t end when they marry, and it doesn’t end when they divorce, and the they of it isn’t really important. What’s important is the he.

His name is Newt Scamander. He’s born small, loud, with wisps of curly hair that will darken to red-blond when he’s older. He has an older brother who loves him, a mother who loves the idea of him, and a father who dotes on him when he remembers. It’s not a bad start.

Later, he gains a nanny. He calls her _Ayah_ at first because that’s what his mother called her, but he learns, soon enough, that her name is Bhudi and she smiles when he uses it. He learns a lot from her, picking up new names and new words and new knowledge until his mother scolds him for the foreign accent that’s invading his speech.

They are in India. It’s 1902. His father works for the British Ministry and his mother ships exotic creatures back to England to grace the menageries of the rich and Bhudi shows him a feather and teaches him about the bird it came from. She speaks in Marathi because the Lady Scamander doesn’t like Newt learning English from her, and, privately, she despairs that if the Lady Scamander wants her son to speak like his parents then perhaps his parents should speak to him so he can learn.

At breakfast, Newt stumbles through asking Theseus to pass the dudha instead of the milk, and his father shakes his head and calls him cute. His mother purses her lips. She commands Newt to follow her that day, and the next, and for the rest of the week he trails her heels as she judges how many peacocks she can convince the Lord Malfoy to buy. They aren’t even magical, but they’re pretty, and because of this they are valuable.

Newt frowns at the little brown peahen that’s pecking at the dirt and has no pretty feathers to make her worth anything, and thinks they should be valuable anyway.

His mother finds she likes the idea of Newt trailing her more than the reality, much like she liked the idea of a pair of sons more than the time it took to raise them. He asks too many questions, he calls things by the wrong names, he has too many stories that distract her from her work. She gives him books instead, worthy and important books to improve his English, and a month later Newt sits at the breakfast table and recounts to Theseus how he’d rescued an “exhausted and dispirited monkey”from a rope snare trap.

“Exhausted and dispirited?” His father repeats, laughing. “Did you hear that, Theseus - your brother’s a scholar in the making!”

Newt doesn’t speak for the rest of the meal. He asks Bhudi what he did wrong, and she tells him that people who set traps for monkeys don’t understand why it’s important that they’re set free.

“But why?” Newt asks.

“If you love the monkey’s coat then you want it always in reach,” she says. “If you love the monkey, then you wait for it to come to you.”

“If I were a monkey,” Newt says, “I would rather be an ugly one with a coat no one liked. Then no one would trap me and ship me off to England, and I could stay here forever with you.”

Bhudi laughs and kisses his forehead, but when Newt is ten he has to leave her behind anyway.

He resents England, when he arrives. It’s cold, and the houses are too close and too dark. There are no peacocks, with grand feathered tails or otherwise. There are no monkeys. His grandmothers speak with accents he can’t understand, heavy with Gaelic undertones that his mother sniffs at and asks the children not to copy. But if he cannot talk to them, and his parents are busy, and Theseus is at boarding school, and Bhudi is in India - then who does Newt have left?

“Namaskar,” he says cautiously to the hippogriffs. “Hello. Um, Ha - halo?” The Gaelic is awkward in his mouth, copied from a greeting he wasn’t supposed to learn, and he ducks in his head in shame because he thinks he got it wrong.

The hippogriff huffs, and when he looks up, it’s ducked it’s head back in mimicry. It almost looks like it’s bowing. And when the next hippogriff comes up, curious, Newt bows again - and the hippogriff blinks in startled thought and then slowly, ponderously, bows back.

“Oh,” Newt says. It’s a new language. Not Marathi, not English, not Gaelic. Well, ok then. He can learn.

And he does. His mother calls the hippogriffs vicious beasts, best handled by experts, suited more to the war that’s brewing than to anything else. Their value, she tells him, is in their strength, their hooked beaks and their curving, deadly talons.

Newt bows and smiles with his mouth closed and straightens the feathers between their wing bones and curls up amongst their foals in the spring, and he tells them, “I’d think you were valuable even if you never fought in a war. I can’t imagine you’d want to. I don’t think you should have to.”

When he’s eleven, he goes to Hogwarts. When he comes back, the hippogriffs are gone, and new ones have taken their place. “These sorts of beasts aren’t pets,” his mother dismisses when he asks. “They’re property.”

And at school: “They’re dangerous.”

And when he’s expelled: “They’re illegal.”

And when he’s gone to war himself, too young, too scared, too short of other options because Theseus went to war and if Newt doesn’t follow him he has to go back home but home is in India with a woman who was more of a mother to him than the one he’s got - when he’s gone to war: “They’re weapons.”

He looks at the dragons and he rubs what poultices he can make into the scars that litter their sides, and he says, “I don’t love you for your fire. I’d wish you didn’t have it, except it’s yours, and if I love you for you then I should love your fire as well. I just wish people wouldn’t keep using you because of it.”

The dragons croon, low, gentle rumbles that they’d use to soothe a frightened hatchling. They bend their necks around him and quietly despair at the way his lack of scales leaves him vulnerable, and when he cries, they hold their wings out over him to shield him from the world.

“You aren’t weapons,” he tells them. “You’re dragons. War is not where dragons live.”

It’s not. War is where dragons die.

When peace is called, Theseus goes back to England, a hero, a leader, a different man than the one who first joined the fight. Newt goes to India, a runaway, expelled and disgraced and the same little boy he always was, loving the birds in the trees even if all he can see of them is the feathers they leave behind.

He doesn’t make it to India. He finds a niffler on the way, and then a bowtruckle; he finds a demiguise and an occamy nest and a nundu.

He calls the nundu Adelaide. She eats scones with clotted cream and jam. She learns his gestures and mimics them back to him, and she takes up all his sofa because she’s not a kitten any more. When Newt publishes a book about the creatures he’s found, someone edits her entry without asking him, and the rest of the wizarding world believe she’s a monster.

Later, he finds a little girl who’s so afraid of her magic it kills her. He finds a thunderbird, kept in chains and forced to bring rain to a patch of desert that should never have been settled to begin with. He takes the thunderbird home and on the way he finds an auror who was fired for doing the right thing, and her sister who’s chosen to wait tables because people are scared of the secrets she hears.

“Pickett,” he says in frustration, “I love you, and because I love you, I’m telling you that you’ll be happier in a tree. Because you’re a bowtruckle. You _belong_ in trees _._ ”

Pickett blows him a raspberry and continues arranging his curls until they look like a crown of flowers in the sun.

Newt calls him an impossible creature, and dutifully passes up a clip so Pickett can fix his work in place.

When he marries, he’s distracted. He’s known all his life what love is, and he knows that if you love something, it’s a careful balancing act. Addie wants to roam, but she always comes home in the end; Pickett wants to stay, and he cries if he’s left behind. Frank wanted to fly with his wings stretched out and his feet never touching the ground, and Dougal wants never to take his medicine again.

It’s difficult, persuading a demiguise to take his pills when he can see the future coming.

Some of these, he can give them. Some of these, because he loves them, he can’t. He says goodbye to Frank. He bargains a compromise with Pickett that won’t put the bowtruckle’s health at risk. He slips Dougal’s medicines into his food and forces himself not to react until at least an hour after they’ve been eaten. He cries when Addie calls for him, and he cries again after a week when she’s settled enough in her new home to stop.

“I miss her,” he admits to Bhudi, one afternoon in May when the jarul are flowering and he finally made it to India. “I checked on her, and she’s doing so well - I think she’s going to have cubs soon. But I miss her.”

“You love her,” Bhudi says, worn and wrinkled and beautiful. “It’s hard to let go of those we love, even if we have no choice. We think it should be enough to know that they’re happy, but sometimes we’re selfish, and that’s ok.” She smiles, and teases, “It’s nice when they come to visit, at least.”

“You were hard to find,” Newt defends. “I’m getting married tomorrow. Do you want to come?”

Bhudi laughs, and tells him to stop worrying about old women when he has something so important waiting in England.

“America,” Newt corrects. “And one thing being important doesn’t make anything else any less so.”

It’s still on his mind when he marries. In his vows, he promises to value this one person above everything else, to put them first, to love them before all others - and it sits wrong. He feels like he’s lying. How can he love one person more than all the dragons that died, more than the niffler that started his journey round the world, more than the monkey he once released from a rope snare trap? He knows so many languages now, even if some of them he lacks the tails to speak, but he doesn’t know how to explain the words that stick inside his throat.

“Newt,” they say, he says, she says, it doesn’t really matter who they are. “I know you. I know who I married. I love you, and you love me, and that’s enough.”

Is it? Because there’s a world, such a big world, with so many creatures and so many people and all of them are so deserving of love but Newt is just one person and how can he save them all how can he make people see how can he ever be _enough -_

He has a son. Galton Scamander. In time he has a grandson, Rolf Scamander, and in time after that two great grandsons, Lorcan and Lysander Scamander.

Addie has a son as well, and two daughters. They don’t have names - not that Newt can pronounce. They hang back warily but Addie prowls forwards and butts her head against his chest, and she still knows the gestures he taught her and the gesture she uses for him is the same as she taught her cubs to use for her.

The niffler has more children than he can keep up with. She dies, in the end, because she is small and nifflers don’t live that long, but she passed on to her children her thieving ways and Newt’s sugar spoons are never safe.

Pickett doesn’t die. His life is tied to his tree. Newt tried so hard to make him bond to an oak, a great sweeping elm that would live for centuries, even a yew that would grow and keep on growing - but Pickett is bound to the tree he chose because Newt would be sad without him and Pickett would rather he not be.

There are no hard words when Newt divorces. Only an apology and an acceptance and a thank you for twenty seven years, and if both of them cry they do it in separate rooms on separate siblings’ shoulders. It is enough, sometimes, to have twenty seven years of happiness and leave it there.

Newt doesn’t cry at Bhudi’s funeral. He wasn’t there, he didn’t know; but when he next goes to visit he is taken to the place her ashes were released, and her daughter hovers awkwardly and decides to leave him to it, and Newt walks until he finds a feather on the ground and tells it in his first language that he doesn’t know what he’s doing and he misses her and he’s trying so hard but he can’t -

He hears a monkey calling out in the darkness, and he stops. He breathes. Pickett crawls up to his shoulder and starts fussing with his hair. When he starts talking again, he tells her about the next book he’s writing, the dragon sanctuaries that are going to open soon, the changes he’s made to the way creatures are taught about at Hogwarts. He tells her about a friend of his who’s just retired from running a bakery, and his son who’s learnt to fly and gives Newt a heart attack every time he goes up on a broom. He tells her about the sunset he saw and the trees he found and the tracks in the forest that belong to something new. He tells her about the world, and everything he loves about it, until he runs out of voice and he tells her everything by saying nothing at all.

In 1997 when he is a hundred years old a boy called Harry Potter breaks out of Gringotts riding the back of a dragon. It’s a Ukranian Ironbelly, scarred from the war, and when it finds Newt it croons, low, gentle rumbles like it’d use to soothe a frightened hatchling.

He is old, now, and he doesn’t run around the world fighting battles for the creatures he loves. But the dragon - his dragon - he digs in his heels and he digs in his cane and he fights until she’s free, because he loves her, because he thought she was dead, because she is old like he is and she failed to guard a vault so she is of little value to the goblins but she’s worth so much more to him.

“She has to live in a sanctuary,” they caution him. “Dragons are too dangerous to be allowed to run wild.”

“And yet people can go where they please,” he retorts, run down and tired and still not ready to stop. But he is no longer naive enough to believe that a dragon without fire is safe from those who would use it; the sanctuary is as much for the dragon’s protection as for anyone else’s.

He takes a month to sort things out. He lives in the old house in Scotland, where his grandmothers used to teach him Gaelic on the sly and make him promise not to let his mother know. There are hippogriffs, and kelpies, and an ever growing hoard of nifflers - he makes arrangements for them all, as best he can.

In the autumn, he packs his life into a beaten up old suitcase, tells Pickett to hold on tight, and apparates to the sanctuary. The dragon lifts her wing and drapes it over him, and Newt rubs poultices into her old scars, and in the evenings the dragon keepers gather round the fires with mugs of whiskey-spiked tea and Newt teaches them how to identify birds from the feathers they leave.

He meets Lorcan and Lysander there, in the sanctuary. They are small, like he was once small, and they will grow to be curious, like he still is. Their mother believes in creatures she cannot see and loves them from the clues she finds, and Newt smiles and asks her name four times and doesn’t remember it and when she goes he looks at the cork necklace in bemusement and wonders why it seems important.

He dies in the spring. There are no jarul flowers, because he is not in India, but there are primrose, and crocus, and blue forget-me-nots - and between them tiny speedwells, close to the ground and small and easy to miss but no less valuable for it.

He leaves behind a dragon on the side of a mountain who can stretch her wings and fly, and a nundu on the open plains who can roam with her pride in tow. He leaves occamies and bowtruckles and demiguises and nifflers, he leaves the knowledge that hippogriffs bow to say hello and thunderbirds should never be forced to stay on the ground. He leaves children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, he leaves generations of students who are taught what it means to love something, he leaves a world that is still struggling and still in need of so much more - but that is, in a thousand tiny ways, so much brighter than it would have been without him.

He doesn’t leave Pickett. He is Pickett’s tree. Pickett will follow him wherever he goes, because without Pickett he will be sad, and Pickett loves him too much to allow it.

They bury him at the sanctuary, his ashes safe beneath the rock he used to lean his cane against, and the dragon keepers take up the job of rubbing poultices into the Ironbelly’s old scars. At his funeral they call him a hero and fighter and a good man, and his brother wheels his way to the front and calls him an idiot boy who got expelled for caring too much and never learnt to stop.

A year after he died, a special edition of his first book is released. It lists the creatures he’d found up until that point in his life, and his notes about what he’d learnt - though the book is prefaced with a caution from his grandson that some of the information was now out of date, and that Newt’s later books refined and corrected a lot of his thoughts. Still, though, there’s something beautiful about the book, raw and unpolished, with no ministry classifications, and illustrations that are at times more enthusiastic than precise. The side notes give a glimpse into the life of the man who wrote it, cautions about nifflers and their attraction to cufflinks, and a winding diatribe on the frustrations of moulting season when the entire nest of occamies have taken residence in your bed.

Between the nifflers and the occamies there’s an entry for nundus. It remarks that they have no concept of how large they grow, that they believe themselves to be lapcats despite being significantly heavier than the owner of the lap in question, and worries that their fondness for scones and jam will do bad things to their teeth. The entry comes with a postscript saying that in the original printed version the ministry had decided nundus were too lethal to be so carelessly written of, and had replaced Newt’s text with one they felt more accurately represented the threat of so large and dangerous a beast.

“Dangerous?” the newest generation of magizoologists say, setting up habitats, warding off breeding grounds, relocating people to places they won’t bother the latest generation of cubs. “Well, yes. It doesn’t make them any less worthy of being loved.”


End file.
